No Time to Waste? There’s a Zero-Day Options ETF for That
Interest in options among both professional and self-directed investors is surging, and new 0TDE ETFs are gaining popularity.

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Talk about a short attention span.
Zero days to expiration (0DTE) refers to options contracts that expire at the end of the trading day, and can be placed on a whole swath of publicly traded securities. While options largely used by retail investors, like puts and calls, mature over much larger time frames, like weeks or months, these strategies are for experienced traders who are willing to take on risk by placing a bet on a single trading day.
They’ve also exploded in popularity after versions found their way to the Cboe exchange in 2022. Interest in options among both professional and self-directed investors is surging with volume topping 2 billion contracts last year, according to Intercontinental Exchange. A handful of companies have even packaged 0DTE contracts in easy-to-use exchange-traded funds. And with all the recent fanfare, advisors are asking questions about how these products work inside client portfolios.
What Are My Options?
As with any aspect of investing that suddenly gets hot and sexy, advisors need to stay a step ahead. Keep in mind, zero-day ETFs typically don’t own the index funds they are writing options on — much less the underlying stocks. Instead, they create a synthetic position using well… options. The strategy is backed by Treasury bills. Roundhill Investments was one of the first-movers in this new corner of the ETF space, but there are a bunch of popular options:
- Roundhill’s Innovation-100 0DTE Covered Call Strategy (QDTE) writes zero-day calls on the popular Invesco QQQ fund. It debuted last March and has $740 million in assets.
- Similarly, Roundhill’s S&P 500 0DTE Covered Call Strategy (XDTE) debuted the same day and looks to track the S&P 500. That fund now has about $360 million in assets.
- Defiance’s S&P 500 Enhanced Options 0DTE Income ETF (WDTE) launched 6 months earlier, though it attracted a lower level of assets, about $72 million.
One main difference between the funds from Roundhill and Defiance is that WDTE sells put options expiring daily, while Roundhill’s ETFs sell covered calls. Call-writing has become more popular than put-writing. While the track records are limited all around, XDTE is up about 20% to WDTE’s 10% gain since their common inception date.
We Want Moore. It all prompts a key question for both advisors and self-directed investors: Because ETF firms are innovating at a rate that makes even the classic Moore’s Law look like a tortoise, are these products suitable for client portfolios? Of course that all depends on individual financial goals and risk tolerances and there won’t be a right or wrong answer. But understanding the complexities of these new ETFs is simply mandatory.
Hey, sometimes good things come to those who just can’t wait.